Associating a Helper Super Class into a datapool in Rational Functional Tester

Helper Super Class; Datapool

Technote (FAQ)

Question

Can you associate a Helper Super Class into a datapool in IBM Rational Functional Tester (RFT)?

Cause

The purpose of a Helper Super Class is to implement a functionality across all the functional scripts within a project where their respective Helper Classes are extended to this Helper Super Class.

The goal is to associate a Helper Super Class with RFT datapool, could help testers to datapool a small script/code which has variables in them and ease the testers to avoid writing extra codes.

Answer

No, it is not recommended to associate a Helper Super Class with datapool from RFT.

The standard procedure to create a Helper Super Class from RFT is File > New > Helper Super Class; however if you attempt to get a Helper Super Class created through any other method you could succeed in associating with RFT datapool, but RFT will throw a NullPointerException while fetching data from the datapool during the script execution.

This could be because certain initialization for RFT may not have happened properly even though the RFT APIs for datapool are exposed here.